Our good old, problematic boy HP Lovecraft is back on this episode of The Black Laser Reads. This time we’ll be reading “The Colour Out of Space” which was originally published in March, 1927.
It’s a bright, cheery story about a New England farmer slowly watching his home, his family, and the world around him slowly decay to ash and madness as he is utterly powerless to resist. It really sings to my own current existential dread due to my inability to care for my family. Very close to home! Very stressful! Except I don’t have a nightmare outer space meteorite to blame.
Enjoy.
The text for this episode came from Standard eBooks. If you are interested in reading “The Colour Out of Space” which is found in Short Fiction yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.
Next time on The Black Laser Reads: something new to the public domain in 2025.
The days are getting shorter, the clocks have been set back, and the weather is (finally) getting colder. Time for (more) horror stories! Also a little bit of literary horror escapism from the current real life political horrors unfolding on the national stage is welcome.
This time on The Black Laser Reads, we’re reading Ambrose Bierce’s 1893 science fiction story which is also sort of a proto-eldritch horror story. It’s good! And there are no problematic elements in it which is a blessing for a story from the nineteenth century. Good work, Ambrose Bierce.
You might recognize the author’s name from your high school American literature class when you read “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge”, another science-fictiony, time-wimey sort of story from the 1890s. What can I say? Dude was ahead of the curve of genre fiction.
Enjoy the story.
The text for this episode came from Standard eBooks. If you are interested in reading “The Damned Thing” which is found in Can Such Things Be? yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.
Next time on The Black Laser Reads: you’ll know when I do!
A recent trip up to the Hudson Valley inspired me to finally dig into my Washington Irving collections. I am familiar with the plots of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, two of Irving’s most famous stories, but I’d never actually read either of them. There are so many things to read, and life is a finite resource. But you can’t go anywhere up in the Hudson Valley without seeing Rip Van Winkle this, Rip Van Winkle that, Rip Van Winkle whatever. Rip Van Winkle Realty. Rip Van Winkle Adventure Guides. Rip Van Winkle Brewing Company. You get it. That absolute in-your-faceness made the decision to start with this story an easy one. Also, it’s pretty short, so not a ton of work to get it done.
“Rip Van Winkle” is the story of a shiftless, good-natured dingus who lives in fear of his wife. Like, pure, white knuckle terror. And Irving does not hesitate to let us know how much she sucks the joy from Van Winkle’s life. Eventually he meets some ghosts, falls asleep for 20 years, wakes up, and learns that the Revolutionary War has happened. And that’s all super weird and disturbing for him! Then he learns that his wife is also dead so he is now free to live his life of aimless wandering and hanging out at the bar, and he is finally happy.
Seriously. That’s it.
Sorry for spoiling it, but the story is more than 200 years old. The moratorium on spoilers expired some time around the Gettysburg Address.
It’s quite dated both in form and attitude, but it’s still a pretty important piece of American short literature. For that reason, probably worth listening to me read it to you for the astonishing price of nothing at all.
Enjoy!
The text for this episode came from Standard eBooks. If you are interested in reading “Rip Van Winkle” which is found in The Sketch-book of Geoffry Crayon, Gent. yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.
Next time on The Black Laser Reads: I have no idea! Let’s be surprised together.
On this episode of The Black Laser Reads we feature the short story Dagon by everyone’s favorite problematic weirdo, HP Lovecraft.
Content warning: Suicide.
This is a classic Lovecraftian story where not very much happens but for some reason the narrator grapples with maintaining his sanity. Really. Dude wakes up on a muddy plane covered in rotting fish, finds a rock that’s carved with fish people, and sees a giant fish monster climbing around. He wakes up in San Francisco and decides to end it.
That’s it!
Light weight, overall, but important for introducing the fish people who would become so important in later Cthulhu mythos tales like Lovercraft’s later The Shadow Over Innsmouth. We’ll get to that one another day. Ultimately, like most of Lovecraft’s work, this story is about the vibe.
Please listen and enjoy, unless you value your sanity.
The text for this episode came from Standard Ebooks. If you are interested in reading “Dagon” or other Lovecraft short fiction yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.
This time on The Black Laser Reads we are digging into Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic gothic horror tale of postpartum depression, internalized misogyny, and gaslighting from an era which predates all those terms.
I like this story a lot. I first encountered it in my creative writing class at Cabrillo College just before the pandemic. It’s clever and effective and efficient. There is not an extra word in the whole story. And, while it was originally published in 1892, it still feels quite modern. The language didn’t give me nearly the challenge that Bartleby did.
Please listen and enjoy.
The text for this episode came from Project Gutenberg. If you are interested in reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.
The next couple episodes are probably going to be on the shorter side with the holidays coming up, but if I can find some time, I’ve got something special in my pocket. Come back and check it out!
This time on The Black Laser Reads we visit Herman Melville’s classic tale of capitalist woe “Bartleby the Scrivener”. You didn’t think we were the first generation to feel ground to death under the heel of our economic system, did you?
You might have read this story in high school English, as I did, and not realized how funny it was. A quick scan of the Goodreads reviews reveals a bunch of readers taking this story very seriously. But I think it’s actually quite humorous, especially in the contrast between the narrator’s uppity opinions of himself and his staff and the reality betrayed by their actions.
I tried to inject a little personality into the performance of this one. It’s easy to lose that in the old fashioned writing style, but there’s plenty of it in the text if you can coax it out a little (and deal with all the commas and semi-colons). It was certainly lost on me the first time I read the story as a 16 year old or whatever back in the 1900s. It was a pleasant discovery as I looked through texts for my next read.
Listen and enjoy.
I apologize to my British readers for Turkey’s accent. I did my best. I will work on it for the future.
The text for this episode came from Project Gutenberg. If you’d like to read “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” yourself, you can find it here.
I’ve got a nice spooky one lined up for next time. If you’d like to be notified when it comes out, subscribe to e-mail notifications and you don’t even need to remember to check. It just shows up! Easy!
October 14, 2024 update – I replaced the Soundcloud embed with a Bandcamp one because Soundcloud is expensive and Bandcamp is not.
Welcome to the inaugural post of the rebooted The Black Laser Reads, a series of audiobooks recorded by yours truly all sourced from the public domain. I attempted this project once before way back in 2011, but I was never happy with the recording quality or the performance. Fly forward 12 years with me and I’ve practiced a ton, figured out how to record myself in much higher quality, and gotten excited for the project all over again.
I even designed a sweet new logo for the series!
Nice, right?
We’re beginning with an old standby: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. This selection was partly inspired by Criterion Channel’s Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Poe retrospective they put up in September (excellent watching all of them) and my simmering hype for the new Mike Flanagan show premiering later this month. Poe seemed a natural start. Plus, Poe was the first one I read in the old version of The Black Laser Reads and who doesn’t love a callback?
Please listen and enjoy.
If you enjoyed it, leave a comment and tell me. If you hated it, leave a comment also! I have tons of texts lined up for this series, and not just short stories. And if you want me to read something from the public domain specifically, let me know.
A huge thanks to Standard Ebooks for providing the text I used in this performance. I mean, they didn’t directly do anything for me, but they do provide an incredible resource for anyone interested in classic ebooks. Really. Go check them out. Fantastic site.
And if you are interested in reading some more Poe yourself, this is the collection I read from.
These aren’t just personal or professional goals, but a mix of the two. In this era of working from home in the midst of being a stay-at-home parent, the lines between the two types of goals are often hazy, so why not mix them together in this list and let it fly? They’re already mixed together in my head. Besides, work is essentially personal since, for me at least, I work to support my life rather than live to work.
I share these with you as a commitment device. If you, faceless reader, know that I am striving to accomplish these things, then I will more easily be able to pressure myself out of slacking.
In no particular order, here we go.
Record some TBLR episodes: I dabbled with The Black Laser Reads many years ago and then sort of let it drop. However, I’ve been thinking about The Black Laser Reads non-stop since then. A dig through the post archive reveals that only two episodes were released, both in the in summer of 2011. That means it’s been bouncing around in my head for ten and a half years with little public action. I’ve finally got an acceptably imperfect VO booth set up here in my office and an ever-deepening list of public domain works that I am interested in. It’s just a matter now of doing the recording.
Make more photos: Sarah and I have this crazy idea of owning a photo studio one day, but, as a photographer, I feel like I still need lots of practice. I’m getting the dust out and I shoot and process very deliberately, but there are so many aspects I need to improve on before I’d be comfortable charging for the work. Practice practice!
Improve my photo compositing skills: I am like a B-minus level photo compositor. The problem is that I don’t really know what I need to do to improve. I enjoy the work, definitely, but I am at a bit of an impasse where I need some structured education in the matter. I really just want our holiday cards to be better than everyone else’s. Simple.
Write more on The Black Laser: I’ve already started doing this. I’d like to keep it up. At the beginning, I wrote here all the time about anything that interested me. A lot of it is very bad, but that is the price we pay to get better at a skill. Then, for many years—let’s call them “The Quiet Years”—I worried that no one cared at all about what I wrote here. That is the result of my skill and taste levels increasing at different rates. Significantly better taste with moderately better skill. Many ideas were hatched and all were killed by the “Why bother?”s. Much silence ensued. Now, while I am still unconvinced that people are too interested in what I have to write, the whole purpose is the bother. That is, the work is the reason to do the work. And I’m enjoying it again!
Write some more stories: During the class at Cabrillo I was on a streak. Sure, it was for the class, but I was in the mindset and the barrier to the work was low. Then we had COVID hit the world, the cross-country move, the triplets pregnancy, the temporary move to Maryland, the birth of the girls, the unending hospital misery, the loss of Olive, the move back to Delaware, and the struggle to figure out how to be parents who work. Somewhere along the way, the needle just sort of popped out of the groove. I’d like to flip it over and start the B side.
Make a local friend: It’s crazy what social distancing and two little girls who can’t walk yet will do to prevent you from making friends. No one’s fault, of course. As much of an introvert as I am, having a friend within driving distance would probably not be such a bad idea. How to make that friend is a totally different proposition.
Continue to practice my penmanship: My handwriting is not bad, by any means, but it is a funny mix of half-remembered cursive and printing. You will often see both a cursive S and a printing S in the same word. I purchased the Spencerian Penmanship book set a few months ago and was steadily practicing while doing overnights just after we brought Penelope and Beatrice home. After the move back to Delaware, I have not been keeping up with it so well. There’s something about not having 8 hours of forced quiet time every single night to make you lose sight of the learning you were doing. Of course, my penmanship doesn’t matter at all, but it’s something I’d like to improve so I am going to.
That’s kind of a lot of stuff, I guess. But there is kind of a lot of time in a year and it is important to have goals. Keep up with me and see how far I get! Commitment devices!
Also, you might have noticed an audio file embedded in the top of this post. Click it! That’s me reading to you on my website for your enjoyment. I thought that adding audio versions of these posts would be a fun way to add a little value to the site and give me a chance to hone my monologue editing skills. You get all the benefit; I do all the work. Win-win.
